Giving ourselves

‘Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves
and take up their cross and follow me.
For whoever wants to save their life will lose it,
but whoever loses their life for me and the gospel will save it.
Mark 8:34-35 (NIV)

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Last Saturday, when I went into Birmingham city centre, I couldn’t help noticing the preparations for the Pride parade later in the day.  There were metal barriers, like those we had seen lining the route for the Queen’s coffin just five days earlier, marking the route for the parade.  There were rainbow flags for sale and in shop windows.

What struck me most forcibly was the contrast between the two processions, separated as they were by just a few days, and the messages they proclaimed.  For ten days we had been encouraged to celebrate the Queen’s self-denial, her devotion to duty and service, and now we were being encouraged to celebrate a culture of ‘be yourself.’

To be honest, I don’t quite know what to make of it.  Do these two cultures – ‘deny yourself’ and ‘be yourself’ – sit uneasily side by side?  Or are we witnessing the shift from a Christian culture of ‘deny yourself’ to a godless one of ‘be yourself’?  Or are they both somehow expressions of the same thing, in that we celebrate someone who denied herself because that was her way of being herself?  I’m not sure.

What I do know is that Jesus calls his followers to ‘deny themselves’ and even ‘lose their lives.’  It seems like suicide, but it’s actually the only way to survive, says Jesus, to give ourselves up to him.  It looks like ‘be yourself’ is the route to happiness and fulfilment, and that any denial of that leads to repression and worse. 

But surely Her Majesty the Queen was right when she said, in some much-quoted words, that “we sometimes need saving from ourselves.”  And we save ourselves by giving ourselves to the Saviour whom God sent.

Yours warmly, in Christ,
Chris Hobbs (Senior Minister)